Army secretary tees up acquisition reforms amid ‘unprecedented’ top cover from Trump administration
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said he will unveil changes that will “completely disrupt” the service’s acquisition processes in the coming weeks.
October 14, 2025 9:29 am
3 min read
The Army’s new secretary says the service is weeks away from unveiling changes that will “completely disrupt” Army acquisition bureaucracy, arguing that the existing system and the civilian leaders who work within it have failed for decades to deliver the capabilities soldiers need.
Speaking at the annual Association of the U.S. Army conference in Washington, Secretary Dan Driscoll offered few specifics on the planned changes, but suggested they would reorient and centralize the current structure, which depends on program executive officers to manage portfolios of weapons systems or related capabilities.
The system as it stands, he said, is much too slow and costly and serves “to line the prime [contractors]’ pockets.”
“Our acquisitions enterprise is more complicated than it should be, and that’s getting in the way of empowering soldiers. So we will combine it all under a single organization that reports directly to senior Army leadership,” he said. “We want fast and efficient. We want to get soldiers the tools they need now, not a decade in the future; we will break down barriers until we measure acquisitions not in years and billions of dollars, but in months and thousands of dollars. We will keep cutting red tape until the capabilities you use at work are equal or better than the ones you use at home.”
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Overall, Driscoll said he intended to model his reforms after the way business is done by Silicon Valley tech firms, calling the approach “absolutely ideal” for the Army.
The service began previewing aspects of that approach at this week’s conference via what it’s calling xTechDisrupt, a “shark tank” style competition that lets small and medium businesses present technology proposals and compete for prizes of $62,500 each to start implementing their ideas over the next 30 days. The Army plans to pick eight winners during the AUSA conference.
“Then, they will take it to the field and iterate with soldiers for another month to improve their product. Our goal is to contract with startups that have never worked with the United States Army before in just 60 to 70 days. For companies we have worked with that have prototype-level entries, we want to contract in 10 and start soldier iterations in 30 to 45 days,” Driscoll said. “We train like we fight. Acquisition should be no different. We wouldn’t take 10 to 12 months to sign a contract while in a fight. So we will train our system to move fast and soon, Ukraine won’t be the only Silicon Valley of warfare.”
xTechDisrupt is, in turn, part of a larger initiative called Fuze that the Army launched in September, designed to bring together the service’s existing innovation programs and make them easier for small businesses to access while connecting those firms to funding with processes patterned after private venture capital models.
“It will identify promising startups, quickly fund them and get minimally viable products to soldiers in weeks,” Driscoll said. “Fuze, like VC firms, will be successful because we will work with agile, innovative, hungry startups that live on the very edge of innovation. We aligned $750 million to this model, and it will increase to $765 million next year. That’s over a 150% increase in the Army’s funding toward emerging tech and innovation.”
More broadly, Driscoll said he sees the current moment as an “inflection point,” and that the Trump administration has given him “unprecedented top cover” to turn around what he claimed has been a pattern of aversion to failure and risk on the part of past Army civilian leaders.
“To our soldiers, you have been let down,” he said. “You have been fighting, deploying, training and preparing for years, and you’ve always had each other’s backs, but unfortunately, your civilian leadership hasn’t always done the same for you. We let you down because we didn’t place you first. The system, the bureaucracy and the prioritization placed you last for decades. That stops now. Everything we’re doing is to empower you, make you more lethal and give you the tools to dominate battlefields and win wars.”
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